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My name is Austin Trees, and I have been playing games for most of my life. There are problems I’ve seen come and go in the gaming industry, but one thing has only gotten worse as time has gone on. That is the need to complain about anything and everything that you don’t understand or like. Whether it is about a title no longer being exclusive, or what platform is best, people tend to react to most topics with a very polarized attitude. We as gamers need to change our out look and not react to news or reviews with such a “Me Versus You” attitude so that the newcomers feel like this is a group that they don’t need to shy away from, and that’s why I’m starting “Parallaxed Game – Depth in layers”.

Parallax scrolling was used in 2d games to show depth in the environment by having multiple levels that a texture is displayed on, each level moves at a different speed for the illusion of depth. I hope to bring a well rounded perspective to every story, review, preview, and interview. I have no training as a writer other than high school English classes, so I won’t be using a vocabulary to alienate the readers of this blog, but I will not have a standard that will encourage the same language that is found in a multiplayer match of halo 3.

The gaming industry as a whole is making more money than the movie industry. Yet we are still seen as the underdog. This fact can be contributed to the young age of the industry, the negative news stories about sex and violence related to games and gamers, and the barrier to entry. That barrier is one of the less talked about problems that the industry faces. Most of the people who bought a PS2 paid less than $150, the DS costs $130, and the Wii… well the Wii is another story coming in at $250. That is the equivalent of having to buy a club membership card to your local movie chain, just so you are able to pay for the ticket. So the fact that we are a growing industry is an amazing feat.

All three console makers are looking to bring in the “non-gamer”, some are doing this more successfully than others, but they all want sales like the PS2, DS, and Wii. In order to create a community based on people who play more than just the latest Madden, WiiSports, Rock Band, Nintendogs, Brain Age, or World of Warcraft, we need to be able to act like normal functioning individuals, rather than just the stereotypical gamer who never leaves the house or the one who shoots up a school.

Feel free to criticize me, I will look towards the comments I receive to make sure I’m staying honest to my goal, and that goal is to try and approach this industry from a different perspective, so that maybe people will come to expect different coverage. I’m not the first person out there to try this, but I hope that I am able to help in the changing of gaming press.

When it comes to reviews, I will not grade a game with a number or a letter, I will grade it based on a seven word review scale. Those words from best to worse are:Amazing, Great, Good, Average, Okay, Bad, & Horrible. The reason I have chosen to go with a word review scale is because when you talk to your friends about a game, you don’t tell them that the game is a 3.9 or a B+ do you? I will tell someone a game is okay, great or horrible. I will only focus my reviews on what a developer is focusing their time on so that they stand out from the crowd and how they are showing the game to the consumers. Why review the story of a game when it was obviously written on a bar napkin.

So I would like to thank you for checking out Parallaxed Game – Depth in Layers, and I hope that you find blog to be refreshing and entertaining.